Comment on The promise of public housing

The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com. Jackson Gandour is the 2020-21 NYU School of Law Fellow at Human Rights Watch. This column was produced for The Progressive magazine and distributed by Tribune News Service. President Joe Biden’s recently announced infrastructure plan calls for the federal government to invest $40 billion in repairing America’s public housing stock, a move that could open a new chapter in the nation’s fraught relationship with public housing. Much of today’s public housing was built following the Great Depression, with the 1937 Housing Act declaring that everyone deserves “decent, safe and sanitary” housing.